‘A troubling prospect;’ SC Supreme Court dismisses case challenging state gerrymandering

“No do-overs needed,” SC Speaker of the House Murrell Smith later posted.

Allen Chaney, Legal Director of the ACLU of South Carolina, said he was proud of the case but “gutted” by the result. “Democracy relies on a careful balance of power between our three branches of government,” he said. “By washing its hands of redistricting, the Court marks itself satisfied with the idea that politicians can game the system to retain their own power and ushers in an even greater entrenchment of political extremism.”

Justices John Cannon Few and Letitia H. Verdin concurred with James’ opinion, while Justice D. Garrison Hill concurred in a separate opinion authored by Chief Justice John Kitteridge.

Chief Justice Kitteridge commended Justice James’ for what he said was a “well-reasoned” opinion, but noted that he did not read the court’s decision as creating a categorical rule that future claims of excessive partisan gerrymandering are beyond judicial intervention. “I construe today’s decision as cautious judicial deference, not indifference,” the chief justice wrote. “It remains conceivable that a future challenge may present more fully developed constitutional violations with a discernable nexus to manageable judicial standards, thereby warranting judicial intervention.”

The US Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 opinion in the 2019 case Rucho v. Common Cause that while partisan gerrymandering may be “incompatible with democratic principles,” it was a nonjusticiable political question, as referenced in Wednesday’s SC Supreme Court opinion. Chief Justice Kittredge continued:

[W]e are seeing — and will continue to see — state legislatures race to further minimize and perhaps erase the representation of the state’s minority political party in Congress. These results may, indeed, be in line with each respective state’s constitution and laws, but they collectively have the effect of diminishing our constitutional republic as a whole. This is a troubling prospect for those who adhere to our nation’s founding principle that the People are sovereign. We can expect the current trend to continue unless the United States Supreme Court steps back into the fray.

“Today’s decision will invariably attract praise and criticism from all corners of the political spectrum,” he concluded. “To those on either side of the debate, I point to the constitutional bedrock of this nation: the sovereign power of the People to shape legislative outcomes through advocacy and the ballot box, a principle more fully explained by James Madison in The Federalist No. 10. Our judicial constraint today in no way muffles the People’s voice in shaping the laws that govern us.”

Gerrymandering comes in two primary forms. Partisan gerrymandering is the practice of drawing boundaries of electoral districts in a certain way to give advantages to one political party over another, while racial gerrymandering limits the voting power of specific ethnic minority groups.

The US Supreme Court previously upheld South Carolina’s district map in May 2024, rejecting a lower court decision on the ACLU’s case Alexander v. SC NAACP, which argued the redrawing of District 1 was an example of racial gerrymandering. The new district lines saw Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn’s sixth district gain nearly two-thirds of the Black, often Democrat voters in Charleston County, while Rep. Nancy Mace’s District 1 became roughly 6% more Republican, effectively eliminating the only swing district in the state and turning it into a red one, while further cementing Clyburn in his.

Read the court’s full opinion here.